What Kind of Philosophy Gets in the News? (J. Stanley)

Lately, a good deal of philosophical research is reaching a
larger public. It seems like every month a major newspaper or magazine
publishes an article on the tremendous progress philosophers have been making
on the problem of consciousness. The New York Times magazine just published an article by Stephen
Pinker on moral grammar that has become wildly popular, though my sense of the
article is that much of its interest to the lay public in fact consists of its
lucid explanations of basic material about meta-ethics. Experimental philosophy
has also recently crossed the boundary into the popular press. But obviously,
there is a ton of philosophy that, by its very nature, is never going to be
reported on in such a medium. Indeed, much philosophy that philosophers
themselves consider to be extremely interesting and innovative is of this
character. The popular press will not be producing articles on Field, Fine, Raz,
or Stalnaker’s recent work, despite the fact that these philosophers produce work that
is among the most admired by other philosophers. Similarly, one can’t imagine a
New York Times article discussing new advances in e.g. actualist accounts of
modality, epistemicist theories of vagueness, Humean accounts of reasons, or
dogmatist accounts of perceptual justification. It isn’t because this kind of
work is narrowly analytical. It’s equally impossible to imagine the New York
Times reporting on any of the topics discussed in Kant’s Critique of Pure
Reason (“Hot New Account of Autonomy Founders on Noumenal Mysteries”?). My
suspicion is that journalists think that the American reading public can only
tolerate philosophy that can be packaged in the format of a popular science
bulletin. Much philosophy simply cannot be packaged in
this mode. The result is that what is most likely to be conveyed in the popular
press about what is ‘hot’ in philosophy is philosophy of a naturalistic bent,
which does not always cohere with what many philosophers would regard as most
interesting.

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What Kind of Philosophy Gets in the News? (J. Stanley)

Lately, a good deal of philosophical research is reaching a
larger public. It seems like every month a major newspaper or magazine
publishes an article on the tremendous progress philosophers have been making
on the problem of consciousness. The New York Times magazine just published an article by Stephen
Pinker on moral grammar that has become wildly popular, though my sense of the
article is that much of its interest to the lay public in fact consists of its
lucid explanations of basic material about meta-ethics. Experimental philosophy
has also recently crossed the boundary into the popular press. But obviously,
there is a ton of philosophy that, by its very nature, is never going to be
reported on in such a medium. Indeed, much philosophy that philosophers
themselves consider to be extremely interesting and innovative is of this
character. The popular press will not be producing articles on Field, Fine, Raz,
or Stalnaker’s recent work, despite the fact that these philosophers produce work that
is among the most admired by other philosophers. Similarly, one can’t imagine a
New York Times article discussing new advances in e.g. actualist accounts of
modality, epistemicist theories of vagueness, Humean accounts of reasons, or
dogmatist accounts of perceptual justification. It isn’t because this kind of
work is narrowly analytical. It’s equally impossible to imagine the New York
Times reporting on any of the topics discussed in Kant’s Critique of Pure
Reason (“Hot New Account of Autonomy Founders on Noumenal Mysteries”?). My
suspicion is that journalists think that the American reading public can only
tolerate philosophy that can be packaged in the format of a popular science
bulletin. Much philosophy simply cannot be packaged in
this mode. The result is that what is most likely to be conveyed in the popular
press about what is ‘hot’ in philosophy is philosophy of a naturalistic bent,
which does not always cohere with what many philosophers would regard as most
interesting.